Not everyone enjoys silence for six months of the year and having wildlife for neighbours. Sharon Kinzel, on the other hand, says she wouldn't want it any other way.
As a fire lookout observer on Blue Hill, west of Sundre, she lives a rather different lifestyle.
“I think it's one of the best places to be, to find an area that you can step outside the mainstream for a little while. I call this my sanity check. I come up the tower and have that deep satisfaction of being home,” Kinzel told the Gazette during a visit to the tower.
She has lived by herself on Blue Hill from April to October for the last 12 years, with no running water, doing laundry by hand and running off generated power.
Her home is a small cabin on top of the hill, with an outhouse for a washroom.
She receives groceries from a colleague at Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resources, who makes the trek up the mountain once a month, so fresh food isn't always an option.
Most of her groceries are non-perishable and she gardens vegetables.
Some fire lookout observers make their own bread, she said.
“There is running water. You run for your water,” she said with a laugh.
At the tower, she studies the weather twice a day and mainly watches for fire hazards.
“We supplement the weather people in the summer when the different patterns come through that are a little more intense than you might get in the winter,” she explained.
“Our main mandate is of course fire detection, so even on low hazard, we still go up, not for as long and maybe not as often, but we go up and we watch for things like abandoned campfires coming up if the winds get up. We look for people burning without permits, especially when the hazard is higher.”
When there is a high hazard, she is up in the tower for more than 12 hours at a time, she said.
A strong wind for Blue Hill is 60-70 km/hr, she said.
“When it's that high, we have to be fairly alert, especially if you have lightning coming in because if things are dry, it can really take off quick,” she said.
“As fast as you can count to five seconds, it's probably gone that much in your visible area, you can see the fire crowning (when the top of the trees catch fire). You can see the flame leap from tree to tree sometimes.”
She has a one-of-a-kind personality, which allows her to isolate herself from the city life for half of the year.
“Back in high school when they asked what you wanted to do for your life in your yearbook, I put down ‘hermit',” she said with a laugh. “Then I took it out and thought that's a bit anti-social, put something else that I never did.
“I wanted to get into lighthouse keeping because I figure that's away from people. I don't mind them, I just don't like them around all the time.”
However, the industry was evolving to mechanized units, so jobs were slim, she said. Then she got into Alberta fire towers.
“I tend to get really shut down when I'm in the city. There's too much crowding and things, and I find myself much happier in an environment where my neighbours are around, just not there,” she said.
Living on Blue Hill, she tends to bond with wildlife in the area. A few years ago, a young bear hung around the area and she named him Daysha Khan.
However, he was extremely curious and she had several people visiting the area at that time with children and unleashed dogs.
“He didn't do any physical damage to the building, he didn't really bother me. Mind you, I'm not going out and enticing a problem,” she said.
“They evacuated him to Clearwater and the next year he came back. I called his name out and he had part of a paw forward and part back. It was almost like the mental process of going ‘I heard that tone of voice before and they took me far away' and he left.”
She also bonded with a fox pup that hung around the area one year. They played fetch and hide and seek, but when he became an adult, he stopped coming around.
A fellow fire lookout observer at a different tower bonded with a fox in his area too. Sadly, when a few hunters were in the area, they shot the fox.
This caused the fire lookout observer to quit a couple of years later, she said.
“You really bond to your tower areas, because for one thing, you're spending most of your life here watching the area, you're seeing the trees, you're seeing the animals, you're identifying different conditions,” she said.
“Most of our fires aren't even found with binoculars. You're scanning the area and then you go, ‘that wasn't there before, what is that?' because you know your horizon line should be a certain pattern.
“When you become that attached to your area, it's good in that regard, you become a good lookout person and it's bad because when changes come it's like ‘oh my tree, you cut my tree'.”
The wildlife varies at each tower, she said. On Blue Hill, she sees several squirrels, rabbits, birds and the occasional deer, moose and bear.
There are quite a few quadders and hikers in the area, which does scare off the wildlife, she said.
“Each site has a lot of distinct characteristics and we take to them. Once you're there for a while, that's home,” she said, adding that there is little turnover in the district because people grow deep roots to their areas.
The Blue Hill tower is the shortest tower in Alberta, being 20 feet high, and the landsite is 6,519 feet high.
The tower covers a 25-square-mile radius of 40,000 hectares, she said, noting that the span is only slightly smaller than Prince Edward Island.
Alberta is the only province in Canada with a full-time forest detection system, she said.
However, she has concerns of technology advancing and eventually wiping out fire towers.
To the north of Blue Hill is the Limestone tower and to the south is the Mockingbird tower, which is in the Calgary region, she said.
There are 132 towers currently in Alberta. Years ago, there was 148, but some have been lost to fires, she said.
The cabin on Blue Hill was rebuilt two years ago and has just enough space for one person to live in.
The Blue Hill lookout was founded in 1928 and has been continually operated since, she said.
Her first year working on Blue Hill, she was evacuated because of the massive Dogrib Creek fire and she says she has been 30 feet away from a lightning strike.
Living on Blue Hill, she has taught herself to paint and she also enjoys photography, baking and reading.
Outside of life on Blue Hill, she enjoys swimming and spending time with her family in Saskatchewan.
She tries to go on a tropical vacation each winter before heading back to the tower.
“I need some summer before I come back to the tower, which has winter again. Getting snow up to the doorknob is not uncommon after we (fire lookout observers) get back. I get snow every month of the year,” she said.
At age 59, she enjoys being independent and says she doesn't like to mingle.
When living at the tower, she knows where everything around her is, but when on the ground, she loses direction.
She started as a fire lookout observer at age 24 and spent 16 years at the Aurora tower north of Nordegg.
She has never been married and doesn't have children, which she says is common for fire lookout observers.
She has never been able to meet someone, because it's hard to get to know someone in the city for the short time before heading back to the tower for six months.
“Sometimes you have to watch how you deal with people when you get out because you're not used to the social standards,” she giggled.
“I find for myself, having done it for most of my life, I have a mindset where I come up and don't think about camping, family picnics, weddings, anniversaries and all the stuff that people do on a normal basis. You just tune it out. That's another world.”
